Orange Grove Residence

Los Angeles, CA, 2,400 SF, 2017.

Currently under construction, this Spanish-Style home in Mid-City was in need of a new kitchen. In the process we opened up the floor plan to create a more fluid connection for cooking, dining, and entertaining.

Lost and Found in La La Land

University of Rochester, Transparent: A Multi-Disciplinary Symposium, December 2016

Presented at the University of Rochester at a multi-disciplinary conference exploring themes in the television show Transparent, Lost and Found in La La Land is an essay thatexplores an important central character of the show -- the city of Los Angeles. Essential to the show’s identity – historic and contemporary Los Angeles is used to provide the viewer deeper understandings of each character beyond their immediate plot lines. LA’s vast diversity of landscapes, buildings, and neighborhoods allow for the definition of home to mean many things. Similar to her work in Afternoon Delight and Six Feet Under, Jill Solloway stunningly portrays LA in its most realistic daily truths, a shape shifting backdrop as each Pfefferman journeys between isolation and community in a quest to find home.

Essay Publication Forthcoming -- Rutgers University Press

CUTTING CORNERS

Exhibited at USC School Of Architecture, August 2016

Bordering Vernon and minutes from Downtown LA, Bell, California is a landscape of unexceptional 80’s era industrial complexes -- banal, repetitive, and anonymous. En route to visit a federal courtroom mock-up built within one of these non-descript facilities I came across the Cheli Distribution Center. Consisting of eleven warehouse buildings located on a stretch of Bandini Boulevard I remembered this particular complex for the pointed moments in which the buildings strive to be something other than typical. Side by side each warehouse has the exact same plan and lay-out but everyone exhibits a different corner condition – a sampler platter of formal techniques as if selected at random from an architectural primer on styles of the previous decades. There are corners with dis-attached gridded scaffolds, prismatic projected volumes, punched arches on an extruded plane, faceted glass voids and more. This collision of strategies and styles may only reinforce the typicality of Cheli, suggesting a lack of sophistication by the author who threw everything in the toolbox its way without understanding the implications of the formal juxtapositions to result. Regardless, I find delight, humor and transparency in the process; albeit a quick-fix attempt to differentiate and distinguish, it’s an ongoing and worthy challenge for designers to consider – can intelligent formal ambition be found within the confines of the efficiency demanded by developer driven projects?

Beyond the whimsical corners and intriguingly named businesses of the Cheli -- Bare Fox, Dreamgirl, to name a few -- the city of Bell has a rather sordid history of hastily cut corners in other arenas as well. It is a small town, population 38,000 and one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County. In 2010 a series of investigative reports in the Los Angeles Times, revealed a web of scandal and corruption in the highest echelon of Bell’s city officials – excessively high salaries, voter fraud, falsified real estate deals, embezzlement from non-profit fund raisers, and tax corruption. The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story and the members of the “Bell Eight” city mayors, administrators and councilmen were fired, resigned, recalled or sent to jail.

These images pay homage to my favorite photographers of the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. Consisting of eight photographers including Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, their work depicted the emergence of suburbs and office parks and presented then new definitions of a man-altered landscape through a lens that attempted to be purposefully blank and objective. Cutting Corners represents an on-going interest in architecture, photography, and narrative – particularly finding tension between unusual and familiar conditions both in the image itself and the underlying back story of its content. It is not objective but the images are presented as an opportunity to see connection between disciplinary concerns we may have as designers and the everyday landscape evolving around us.

Undercover Picnic

Downtown LA, CA, Competition Finalist, 2016.

UNDERCOVER PICNIC was selected as one of three finalists in a design competition for a new canopy/shade structure to be built this summer in Grand Park in Downtown LA sponsored by the Goldhirsch Foundation's My LA2050 Grants Challenge.

Drawing inspiration from the idea of Grand Park being everyone’s backyard, our proposal envisioned the new canopy as a floating picnic blanket in the sky, sheltering a territory for collective gathering and revelry. The design synthesizes the graphic iconographies of familiar picnic spreads like traditional gingham with the vibrant colorways and palettes of Mexican serapes, to remind us of shared meals in the park with family or lounging under the stars at an outdoor movie. It is inviting and familiar yet the large scale and abstraction of the pattern and object creates a wholly unique experience synonymous with the novel role Grand Park plays as a resource to the entire city of Los Angeles.

One of our interests lied in the potential mis-registration and re-registration of the pattern as you move through and underneath the canopy. Transparency or translucency would allow for the overlap of 2 layers and blending to make new colors throughout the day based on light conditions making for a colorful and unique experience at each visit.

Designed in collaboration with Jenny Myers.

Cleveland Residence

Glendale, CA, 2,400 SF, 2015.

Currently in progress, this two-story Glendale home is located next to Brand Park at the base of the Verdugo Mountains. Built in 1937 with very little updating over the years, the house required extensive interior renovation and infrastructural replacement. Working with a highly compartmentalized existing floor plan, EEK studio sought to open up the home's living spaces by creating a fluid dining room, kitchen, and breakfast room. With brand new kitchen, 3.5 baths and all new finishes this home will serve as a fresh efficient, beautiful, and comforting space for a growing young family.

Rosemont Residence

Pasadena, CA, 1000 SF, 2015.

A+D : Peter Shire

Los Angeles, CA, 3,000 SF, 2014.

Exhibition design and installation for Peter Shire: Public Works, Lines of Desire exhibited at A+D Museum.

Completed in collaboration with Peter and Donna Shire and curator Jo Lauria.

2015

FIELD TRIP

Hollywood, CA, 700 SF, 2014.

Located at Hollywood and Vine, and helmed by acclaimed chef Minh Phan and pastry chef Sarah Lange, Field Trip was a pop up daytime restaurant that transformed into Porridge + Puffs at night.

With one month and the tiniest of budgets, this was a quick and fun project relying on a new color scheme and graphics to transform the existing Farmer's Kitchen into a fresh space honoring the award-winning food and vision of its proprietors.

Beachwood Cafe

Hollywood, CA, 2,000 SF, 2012.

Interior renovation of a historic cafe in Hollywood’s Beachwood Canyon.

PWC

GYROSCOPE LOUBOUTIN

New York, NY, 2011.

Shoe display prototype for Christian Louboutin stores worldwide.

Designed in collaboration with 212box architecture.

OPERA ON THE EVAPORATING SEA

Salton Sea, CA, 2009.

Located on an island in the Salton Sea, a man-made lake in California undergoing massive ecological change, this design proposes an Opera House intending to represent the liminality of the site and the constantly shifting and evolving landscape condition. Pairing a constructed place with a constructed art becomes less about juxtaposition and more about enhancing and exaggerating a bizarre resonance and experience.

NO ASSEMBLAGE REQUIRED

Detroit, MI, 2010.

This speculative architectural proposal is most interested in exploring architectural re-readings of Detroit that attempt to dislocate the dominant narrative and image of the city that continues to be exploited; blight, ruin, decay, the rise and fall of the American Dream. The challenge of intervening in such a vast and complex urban fabric lies in creating architecture for an unpredictable future that is not imbued with false or unrealistic goals of redemption and salvation. Years of decline and dysfunction cannot be solved with a new concert hall or million-dollar monorail. Instead clues of how to work within the city can be found from what is already there.

Detroit is a city that has produced its own particular brand of adaptive re-use, borne of extreme urban conditions and characterized by improvised urban systems and seemingly contradictory juxtapositions. The informal urbanity and DIY/LAWLESS appropriation currently happening in Detroit is its greatest asset and what needs to be learned from most of all in projective endeavors.

Considering the vast stock of abandoned buildings in the city SOME ASSEMBLAGE REQUIRED considers the moment when a building’s original purpose comes to an end not as one of obsolescence but as the potential for a new point of origin in the building’s existence. It explores the idea of regenerative architecture based on opportunities within the unscripted afterlife of a building. It has been the object of territory battles, formal and informal spatial and programmatic re-appropriations, and is a humming site of emergent process, natural and man-made.

SOME ASSEMBLAGE REQUIRED proposes a 100-year long designed demolition of the Packard Plant. A convention center is located on the site, to host events and projected inhabitations and architectural constructs as the building is breaking down due to man-made and naturally occurring entropic processes.

At the Packard Plant the very processes, mechanisms, and spatial circumstance that are contributing to the building’s natural decay, fragmentation, and breaking down, enable a regeneration and rereading of spaces. The visual sequence, sensorial experiences, and unbelievable circumstances of the Packard Plant causes a deep questioning of context, scale, and spatial definitions. No longer defined by the programmatic constraints of assembly and production, spatial zones are demarcated by ephemeral and often inverted parameters: light, texture, and surfaces that are in constant transition. One’s senses are heightened as elements taken for granted; colors, sounds, and smells are unbelievably exaggerated and ambiguous.

The transformation of the ruin takes its cues both from the original genetics of the architecture AND the feral processes, uses and changes that naturally emerged from its decayed state to provide an alternate image to its current role as ruin porn. The proposed constructs and scenarios seek to project potential inhabitations and transformations using the spatial logics and processes currently at play on the site . They do not attempt to coalesce into an overall big picture or master-planning scheme but rather represent a collection of opportunities or regenerative moments drawn from the conditions of the site and from which new spatial readings and futures of the site could occur. Some are about instigating a result or effect based on exacerbating entropic processes while others are about defining or celebrating a space before its gone.

The intention of the project is to operate within a logic of constant change and indeterminacy. While there may be deliberate construction of spaces, the definition of these spaces is subject to processes of decay and the collective agreement of visitors and inhabitants of the building, preserving the lack of authority that defines the Packard’s afterlife.

TERRAIN VAGUE

The images in this series represent an on-going interest in the notion of Terrain Vague, defined by Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubio as vacancies within the built environment that embody in their absence “the space of the possible, of expectation.” While this concept is hardly new, there is no doubt that architects continue to be inspired and intrigued by both the latent and emergent potential in regions of emptiness, vacancy, and entropy. This collection of images stems from a year of funded travel through the Appleton Fellowship granted through Harvard University. Visiting and collecting this visual atlas of non-places is in initial step towards considering a much bigger architectural question. How do we as architects design for indeterminate future use? How do we create viable designs that endure due to their conceptual and physical adaptability?